Come and join over 200 other women who are studying the REAL meaning of love, God's love. Our 30 week study starts September 9th, 6:50 pm at Covenant Presbyterian Church in Orange. Located near the corner of Taft and Orange-Olive Road. See registration form at top right-hand side of this blog.
If I say the
phrase “the love of God,” many thoughts might pop into your mind. If you’re a
hymn lover you might think of the
chorus, “Oh love of God, how rich and pure! How measureless and strong! It
shall forevermore endure the saints’ and angels’ song.” On a more contemporary
level, if you love the singer Marty Goetz, who is a Messianic Jew, you might
hear the words, “There for you, there for me, there for free, the love of God.”
Or maybe you don’t hear music at all. Maybe John 3:16 comes to mind: “For God
so love the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believes in
Him might not perish but have everlasting life.” Of course it’s also possible
that you’ve never been aware of the love of God, so that phrase brings only
doubts. What I hope you will all think about by the time we’re finished
with our 30 week study in the books of 1 and 2 Corinthians is that all
followers of Jesus Christ are to not only BE loved with God’s love, but they’re
commanded to love OTHERS with the same kind of love. We can’t do that until we
understand what God’s love looks like. 1 and 2 Corinthians will give us a gold
mine of information on how God loves and how we can learn to love like He does.
Of course even
people who have never read the Bible have heard 1 Cor 13 read, “Love is
patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not
proud. It does not dishonor others, it
is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6
Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always
protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.8 Love never fails.”
Well, let me ask you a question and I want you to be totally honest. You don’t
have to answer out loud, but as you look
at the way you love others, how does it measure up to that standard? I sort of
fall apart at the first line, “love is patient”! “It doesn’t envy” doesn’t help
me much either! How about “keeping no record of wrongs”? I think it quickly
becomes apparent that the love spoken of here is the highest ideal of love.
It’s the way God loves.
So how can we, as mere mortals, be asked to love each
other in this exact same way? That brings us right back to our Corinthians
study, because within these two books we come face to face with the Holy
Spirit. That’s the only way we will ever be able to love with God’s
love---through the Holy Spirit who is given to each person who receives Jesus
as their Savior and Lord. We’re going to learn so much about Him this year—and
notice I said HIM. The Holy Spirit is
not a force or a power, He is a person.
We will also be looking at the gifts that He gives to us and hopefully
identifying which ones are working in our individual lives.
In addition, so
many important and contemporary topics will be addressed in our study this
year, one of the most pivotal being what happens when the church begins to veer
away from the truth of God’s Word and begins to exchange it for the world’s
standards? Paul the Apostle, the writer of Corinthians, will help us understand
how to be culturally sensitive while remaining doctrinally sound and
spiritually pure. We will study, singleness, marriage, and divorce and what God
says about it. We will also look at life after death and what it means to the
Christian. And that’s just in 1 Corinthians! In 2 Corinthians the central theme
will be the relationship between suffering and the power of the Holy Spirit.
Who hasn’t asked the question, “Why” in the face of personal suffering or
suffering as seen in the world today?
We will also receive a short course in spiritual warfare
and how to battle our true enemy, Satan. Yes, he’s real, and he hates you. The
great Christian poet and commentary writer J. Sidlow Baxter wrote that studying
Corinthians is “like trying to hold the ocean in a teacup”. That makes me think
of the last verse of the hymn I quoted earlier, speaking of the love of God: “Could we with ink the ocean
fill, and were the skies of parchment made, were every stalk on earth a quill,
and every man a scribe by trade; to write the love of God above would drain the
ocean dry; nor could the scroll contain the whole, though stretched from sky to
sky.
I hope you’ll join us at CBS and experience the love of God for
yourself.
In His Service~Patty Bivens
No comments:
Post a Comment